Data Engineer

We’re 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology h has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that’s the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too!

We’re looking for a Data Engineer who thrives on building scalable, impactful solutions. Your work will power smarter decisions, unlock insights, and help us push the boundaries of what’s possible with data.

This is a hands‑on technical role where you’ll design and build data solutions for both projects and long‑term products. You’ll take ownership of developing and implementing data pipelines, designing and maintaining databases, and ensuring solutions align with our technical standards and data platform best practices.

We know great engineering isn’t tied to a desk. Whether you prefer working remotely in the UK or enjoy the occasional day in the office in either Haywards Heath, West Sussex or Salford Quays, Manchester
, you’ll have the freedom to choose the setup that suits you best.

If you’ve strong experience with PySpark, Python and SQL
, we’d love to hear from you. Apply today to learn more about this exciting role.

Core skills we’re looking for to succeed in the role:

• Cloud & Data Engineering
  :
  You’ll bring expertise in modern cloud platforms, delivering scalable and robust data solutions, with engineering and database skills in Py Spark ,
  Python
  , SQL Server and/or Azure (Data factory, Synapse) and the associated ETL technologies.
• Problem‑Solving & Innovation: You’ll thrive on tackling complex challenges, finding creative solutions, and approaching every task with a proactive, optimistic mindset.
• Organisation & Delivery: You’ll balance multiple priorities with confidence, staying organised and focused. You’ll take pride in delivering high‑quality outcomes by following standards and designs, while suggesting improvements that raise the bar.
• Collaboration & Teamwork: You’ll thrive in a collaborative environment, working towards shared goals while supporting and mentoring less experienced engineers to achieve their potential.
• Energy & Motivation: With a proactive, positive approach, you’ll motivate those around you through your “can do, will do” attitude.

What’s involved:

• You’ll develop low to high complexity, secure, governed, high quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off premise, internal and external data sources
• You’ll ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases
• You’ll build data observability and data quality by design into all Data pipelines, promoting self‑testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies
• You’ll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business intelligence systems and analytics applications
• You’ll build physical data models that are appropriately designed to meet business needs and optimise storage requirements, ensuring maximum re‑use
• You’ll carry out unit testing of own code, and peer testing of others code to ensure appropriate quality
• You’ll maintain effective, and appropriate documentation that brings transparency and understandability to pipelines created and code created.
• You’ll follow coding standards, architectural principles, solution design/architecture and release management processes to ensure safe, high quality, compliant code
• You’ll coach and mentor Associate data engineers.
• You’ll create low to high complexity BI solutions including data mart, semantic layer, and reporting & visualisation solutions in recognised BI tools such as Power
  
  BI.

Experience & knowledge

• Requires experience of designing and building end to end data solutions (2-5 years).
• Engineering and database skills in SQL Server and/or Azure (Data factory, Synapse) and the associated ETL technologies.
• Experience of working with large, event based, datasets in an enterprise environment.
• Experien…